My newly completed novel is The Fall of the Berlin Wall, about what happened to characters from my Hungry Generations fifteen years later; it's about musicians and particularly the intense, irrepressible daughter of the legendary pianist at the center of the previous novel. My 2015 novel, The Ash Tree, was published by West of West Books in conjunction with the April 24, 2015 centenary of the Armenian genocide; it's about an Armenian-American family and the sweep of their history in the twentieth century - particularly from the points of view of two women in the family.

There are three other novels of mine, One is Pathological States, about a physician's family in L.A. in 1962, which is as yet unpublished. Another is Hungry Generations, about a young composer's friendship in L.A. with the family of a virtuoso pianist, published on demand by iUniverse. A Burnt Offering - a fable (a rewriting and expansion of my earlier Acts of Terror and Contrition - a nuclear fable) is my political novella about Israel and its reactions to the possibility of a war with Iran (with the fear that it will be a nuclear war).From a reader's review:"At times the reader races ahead to find out the fate of the cast of characters and the fate of nations. At others, the reader is stopped mid-page to consider the paradoxes of the nuclear world and the world of realpolitik. This is an important, timely book that deserves a wide audience." For a fuller description of them, look for the relevant blog posts below or click on one of the Amazon.com links. KINDLE editions of these novels are also available.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Beethoven xii - Adorno on Beethoven

I recently finished
reading Beethoven: Philosophy of Music
by Theodor Adorno, and I’m tempted to try to “reduce” – literally and figuratively
– some of his main formulations to a posting or two of commentary here. Reading
his extraordinarily insightful yet fragmented and abstract commentary is, of
course, a challenge. However, the book provides at times such a revelation, particularly
about Beethoven’s late works, even as Adorno’s prose is designed to repel easy
assimilation (the Jephcott translation is not unapproachable - is probably more approachable for explicitly being a set of fragments [Stanford
University Press, 1998]). So, for better or worse, I hope here to make a bit
more accessible some of that commentary.

Here is an early example of Adorno’s
stark formulations:

“It is conceivable that
Beethoven actually wanted to go deaf – because he had already had a taste of
the sensuous side of music as it is blared from loudspeakers today. ‘The world
is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.’ Karl Kraus” (31).
Then he quotes George Groddeck: “‘Beethoven went deaf so that he could hear
nothing but the singing daemon within him.’” Later, Adorno comments on the
composer’s solitude in the midst of “the plebian habitus of his humanity…which
– suffering and protesting – feels the fissure of its loneliness. Loneliness is
what the emancipated individual is condemned to in a society retaining the
mores of the absolutist age” (45). As his music “goes beyond” the conventions
of “bourgeois society,” Beethoven “exceeds the bounds of a reality whose
suffering imperfections are what conjures up art” in the first place (47).

The first forty or so pages
of Adorno’s book offer many such stark paradoxes (often seeming to mix Hegel,
Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche) in what amounts to a sort of overture of fragments,
a disassembly of motifs; these motifs are also presented in a more integrated fashion
in a sequence titled “The Mediation between Music and Society” from Introduction to the Sociology of Music
(43-49). From about page 50 to 123, the commentary focuses more fully on
Beethoven’s middle period and particularly on the significance of sonata form with
some attention to the powerful example of the Appassionata sonata (also, in the
midst here, there is a chapter discussing the symphonies, the Eroica, etc.). The
seventy pages following page 123 are focused more fully on Beethoven’s late
works.

For Adorno, the significance
of Beethoven’s music results, on the one hand, from its power as form, its
autonomous structure of expression, and on the other hand, from its resistant engagement
of his society’s “ideology,” its assumed values and power relations. This dual
emphasis is clear at the very start of Adorno’s commentary when he declares
that the “ideological significance” of Beethoven’s music is that it is “a voice
lifted up, that it is music at all,” and this significance is heightened beyond
the ordinary because, for Beethoven, the very possibility of having an uplifted
voice is placed into question by bourgeois ideology – is falsified by its domination
of thought and expression (6).

Beethoven’s music attempts to
overcome that “crushing” domination and the seemingly patent “a priori untruth” and falsity of having a
voice in the first place in such a society, and he does so by creating music
which is continually in process, absorbing, moving, and dodging among
conventions, and “unfolding truth” from “nothing,” from the barest motifs: “Beethoven’s
work can be seen as an attempt to revoke the a priori untruth of music’s voice, of its being music at all,
through its immanent movement as an unfolding truth. Hence, perhaps, the
insignificance of its starting point: this is nothing…” (7). I’m reminded of
the notion of “making music” I broached in my last post – that in performing
Beethoven’s work, one seems to be not only witnessing but participating in the
creation of the piece, the working out of motifs, the resolution of tensions,
the upwellings of feeling: in short, we feel we are participating with
Beethoven in ‘making’ the music.

What we witness and “realize”
in sound, in Adorno’s view of Beethoven, is music in the very process of creation: music that “brings forth
itself...as a tour de force, a
paradox, a creatio ex nihilo…a
‘floating’” experiment, forming music out of the simplest details, even as – in
this Marxist-Hegelian view – its form is “mediated” and “comprehensible only in
terms of its function within the reproduction of society as a whole.” The
“liberated details” of his music enact and resist – through a process of
estranged open-endedness – the concept that in “bourgeois”
society all is “interchangeable” or “fungible,” that no individual detail (no
musical note, banknote, or person) exists in itself and everything exists in relation
to the whole (34). Beethoven’s reimagining in music of the relation of parts to
the whole confronts and intentionally disturbs the typical bourgeois listener, for
whom the “amusement” of music is embraced as “a way to defeat boredom” (8), as
a distraction from the ennui familiar to Baudelaire.

“If Beethoven is the musical
prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the
prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is
esthetically fully autonomous, a servant no longer. His work explodes the
schema of a complaisant adequacy of music and society” (43), and the music does
so by “reconstructing out of freedom” the otherwise self-deluded bourgeois
assumptions about the power of self-projection and the free will to impose a masterful
unity.

“By its power, his successful
work of art posits the real success of what was in reality a failure,” for “that
bourgeois society is exploded by its own immanent dynamic – this is imprinted
in Beethoven’s music,” whose creative process both reproduces and puts to shame
(“explodes”) the “esthetic untruth” of bourgeois expressiveness and freedom,
which are revealed as a deluded nullity in comparison to the power of the music
(46).

Though my account here may
well misrepresent (or at least fail to clarify) Adorno’s difficult formulations, I’ll
keep trying and turn to Adorno’s treatment of the Appassionata sonata in my next post.

Buy "Hungry Generations" here - a novel about L.A. and European expatriates living there.

Purchase "Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music" here.

The Ash Tree - a novel

About Me

"The Ash Tree" about a family of Armenian-Americans, from 1915 to the early 1970s, is being published April 24, 2015, on the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. My 2004 novel "Hungry Generations" is about the encounter between a young composer in L.A. in the 70s and the family of a great virtuoso pianist, who knew Schoenberg and Stravinsky there in the 40s. Also, there's my critical book on modern fiction and music, "Fullness of Dissonance" (1994), as well as various stories and articles in print. My novella and story collection "Acts of Terror and Contrition" was published in 2011. Current projects: "Pathological States" (an unpublished novel), "Conrad in the Twentieth Century" and "Beethoven and modernity" (both non-fiction books). I'm married to the artist Jeanette Arax Melnick, whose paintings are on the cover of three of my books. You can contact me either by leaving a comment on a post or at danielcmelnick@gmail.com.